Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1887-03-19
MONARCnS ALMOST MAD.
Some Absolute sovereigns Who Have Boon
Poisoned by Power.

Some Absolute sovereigns Who Have Boon
Poisoned by Power.
| De Quincy, ia his wonderful study Of
the early Caesars, the paper in which mis-
| power of suggestive narrative and his
control over the resources of language
are perhaps seen at their best, is, so to
! speak, driven by wonder at the wild will
| fulness Of his subjects to suggest that all
| the Caesars of the Julian house We're
mad. Caligula may have been, says the
! Spectator, though his symptoms, as re-
! corded by SuetCnius, are rather those Of
deliTium tremens; but the theory
which makes of the grand though SIMS
ter states ian, Tiberius, who gave the
Roman monarchy it's final impress, man
of dioordeTed mind in the ordinary medi-
cal sense, will not readily be accepted as
correct. He was no more mad than
Philip II, whose private life was much of
the same kind. 1t would, as we read his
tory, be fsr trUer to say that power, when
really abSOlute-SO absolute that the vO-
lition is executive and the necessity for
self-res.Taint is unfelt-2 produces of itself
a special mental disease which is not In
sanity, because it would disappear with
the power, but which has at intervals,
ike Inc pdSSlOu Vi GuuUtGDJ udDy u It's
external symptoms and effects.
Nero, the artist Emperor, who was
always seeking the impossible and whom
the early Christians believed to be the
veritabIe incarnation of evil, may be said
undoubtedly TO have suffered from it; so
did one OF two Of the Italian tyrantS of
the renaissance, and so, in our judy
ment, though it is a disputable point, did
T,ro, [o Of hot Snrf
though it does not always injure the
mfnd-for several OF the Caesars
and some of EmperOrs of Delhi
were men of splendid sanity and
judgment-when it happens TO fall to
man predisposed by inherited tendency
or by drink, or by special solitariness OF
nature, undoubtedly weakens the re-
strSining force of the will and strengthens
impulse until many Of his acts resemble
closely the acts of madmen. Half the
great sovereigns of Asia, If their private
lives were accurately known, would be,
seen to nave had their characters, so to
speak, poisoned by power, as directly as
it they had been poisoned with one OF thei
drugs which temporarily disturb reason.
Drink, wild and continuous drunken
ness with bad brandy, was the predispos-
ing cause in Peter the Great, and it Is be-
lieved in Theebaw, and probably in the
Emperor Baber, who, wise by daylight.
would in the moonlight occupy himself
with jumping from battlement to battle
ment of his palace, eighty feet from
the ground. In Car Paul the
predisposing cause was probably an
insane tendency, though that is not
quite proved; and in Alexander III it is
a solitariness almost beyond example.
There is not man IN the world more
deeply to be pltied than the present
Emperor of Russia. The loneliness Of
Kings, a loneliness naturally resulting
from their place, which hardly admits Of
friendship, and does not amt of
equality is always terrible, and is fire.
quentIy felt by themselves so severely
that they break through all restraints OF
prudence and moral law IN order to be rid
of it.